when the gospel was heard only in Israel, Christianity was thus a world religion
because it saw the world as a whole in crisis, and appealed to all men in the world to
save their souls.
This holds true also for Buddhism. Though developed in India and has been
sustained mainly in Asian countries, it is undeniably a world religion. Unlike Western
monotheism, it does not speak of the Creator of the world but rather proposes the
emptiness of all our experiences. All is void of self (Sanskrit: anatman). The core of
Buddhism is the radical experience of our being-in-the-world as crisis. For Buddhists
nothing in this world can be relied on. Convinced of universal emptiness, they know
that even this insight of emptiness can become an entity and thus an obstacle to
enlightenment. What has attracted Westerners to Buddhism therefore seems not a
trivial or frivolous curiosity, but a serious quest for authentic spiritual radicalism.
Western religions and BuddhismIt is far from my point to designate Judeo-Christian religion and Buddhism as
Western and Eastern religions. The tendency to describe a certain world view in terms
of its geographical background can be rightly called ‘regionalist’. Implicitly
ideological, it deprives world views of their universal contents. Yet it should be
distinguished from the correct assumption that types of world view are limited
historically and socioculturally. Buddhism and Western religions being world
religions, one might say that the dialogue between the East and the West is a
manifestation of the dialogue of the world with itself. The encounter between these
religions is not so much an encounter between the East and the West, but a dialogue,
or rather a monologue, of the world or the cosmos with itself. In other words, the
self-realization of the world as a whole is taking place, despite the obvious plurality
of the world religions.
What is a world religion? Not defined through its worldwide spread, it is elaborated
by its conception of the world as a whole. But this wholeness of the world manifests
itself especially in times of crisis. Then all things of the world display their
interrelatedness, insubstantiality, and dependence on their metaphysical basis which
makes the world appear as a whole. Such a definition of world religion, however,
sounds rather abstract. Concretely speaking, what does it mean? Peter Meinhold
(1978), a Protestant theologian, in this context claims that every concept of a world
religion needs a certain world experience and a certain world interpretation.
Specifying their special character in the twentieth century, he states that ‘world
religions’ in the modern sense are ‘those religions which are ready to confront
themselves with the problem of their plurality and to bring it to a resolution
corresponding to the conception of the world today and meeting it’ (Meinhold
1978:24). How is ‘the world’ understood today? Through modern means of
communication it has come to be experienced more and more as a unit. With this
experience of the unity of the world modern people have come to realize the
connection of its parts, they have seen that there are no isolated problems in the world.
Every problem proves to be, sooner or later, a world problem. According to Meinhold,
BUDDHISM, RELIGION AND PSYCHOTHERAPY IN THE WORLD TODAY 23